Most advertising is ineffective. Research shows that 75 per cent of press ads are not even read. And most of these are the work of big sophisticated agencies. So they are merely wasting the clients money. ...
Agencies and clients have become too sophisticated, whereas advertising is not a sophisticated business at all. Its a simple business.

I have lately obtained the opinion of a number of Chief Constables, who declare with almost complete unanimity that the recent great increase in juvenile delinquency is, to a considerable extent, due to demoralising cinematograph films.

In directing this studio, I shall produce films which will compare favourably with those on the American market. I want the English to be on top. There is a big fight ahead in the film business. We mean to win. But one thing I promise you, ladies and gentlemen, it is this: if we fail well give in like sportsmen!

It started with a bunch of midnight rounders
Who never sleep, they are the foundersOf the Nighthawk Club, you know,
For listeners-in on the radio.When Coon and Sanders start to play
Those Night Hawk Blues you've got to play.Tune right in on the radio,
Grab a telegram and say hello.

 Night Hawk Blues, played by Coon-Sanders Original Nighthawks Orchestra from December 1922 on WDAF, Kansas City, the first radio programme to ask listeners to send in requests by telegram for playing on air. The song was recorded by Victor in April 1924. Listen to an extract

DAVID SARNOFF

1891-1971; American businessman, President of Radio Corporation of America (RCA)

1 I have in mind a plan of development which would make a radio a household utility in the same sense as the piano or phonograph. The idea is to bring music into the house by wireless. While this has been tried in the past by wires, its has been a failure because wires do not lend themselves to this scheme. With radio, however, it would seem to be entirely feasible. ... The receivers can be designed in the form of a simple Radio Music Box and arranged for several different wavelengths, which should be changeable with the throwing of a single switch or pressing of a single button.

 memorandum to Edward J Nally, vice-president and general manager of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America, 30 September 1915; Sarnoff was then the companys contract manager.

2 Let us organise a separate and distinct company, to be known as the Public Service Broadcasting Company or National Radio Broadcasting Company or American Radio Broadcasting Company, or some similar name. ... Since the proposed company is to pay the cost of broadcasting as well as the cost of its own administrative operations, it is, of course, necessary to provide it with a source of income sufficient to defray all of its expenses. As a means for providing such income, I tentatively suggest that the Radio Corporation [of America] pay over to the broadcasting company two per cent of its gross radio sales. ... Since the broadcasting company is to be organized on the basis of rendering a public service commensurate with its financial ability to do so, it is conceivable that plans may be devised by it whereby it will receive public support and, in fact, there may even appear on the horizon a public benefactor who will be willing to contribute a large sum in the form of an endowment. ... Once the broadcasting company is established as a public service and the general public educated to the idea that the sole function of the company is to provide the public with a service as good and extensive as its total income permits, I feel that with suitable publicity activities, such a company will ultimately be regarded as a public institution of great value, in the same sense that a library, for example, is regarded today.

 Letter to E W Rice Jr, Honorary Chairman of the Board, General Electric Company, 17 June 1922. The initial response was apparently 'The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?'

3 Television would be a theater in every home.

 Quoted in the New York Times, 13 July 1930

4 The potential audience of television in its ultimate development may reasonably be expected to be limited only by the population of the earth itself.

 1931

5 Television in the home is now technically feasible. The difficulties confronting this difficult and complicated art can only be solved from operating experience, actually serving the public in their homes.

 October 1938; by this time the BBC has been broadcasting television to UK homes for six years

6 With the advent of television a new force is being given to the world. Who can tell what the power to extend vision will mean ultimately in the stream of human life?

 'Probable Influences of Television on Society' in Journal of Applied Physics, July 1939

7 [Sarnoff predicted that in 1945-50, television would fit well with a population shift to the new automobile suburbs]

 Possible social effects of television, 1941

8 I have lived through several periods of development in the fields of communication and entertainment. I remember the day when wireless as a service of transoceanic communication was regarded by some as a joke. Those who owned cables could not see wireless as a competitor of cables. Who would entrust important messages to a medium that was filled with static? I lived through the day when the Victor Talking Machine Company could not understand how people would sit at home and listen to music that someone else decided they should hear. And so they felt that the radio music box and radio broadcasting were a toy and would be a fancy.
I saw the same thing happen in the field of talking motion pictures. It was urged by many that people would not go to a movie that made a lot of noise and bellowed through an amplifier and disturbed the slumber of those who enjoyed the silent movie and thenin 1927came Warner Brothers with The Jazz Singer and Al Jolson. Almost overnight a new industry was born. Today, who goes to a silent movie?
Let me assure you, my friends, after more than forty years of experience in this field of communications and entertainment, I have never seen any protection in merely standing still. There is no protection except through progress. Therefore, may I leave you with this final thought: I would suggest that you reflect carefully and thoughtfully upon the possible ultimate effects of television upon your established business if you do nothing, and of the great opportunities for your present and future businesses if you do the right thing!

 1947

9 It is probable that television drama of high caliber and produced by first-rate artists will materially raise the level of dramatic taste of the American nation.

 source unknown

10 Seldom is it given to one generation to have such an opportunity to rise again, but now before you is that opportunity in television—a larger, richer, broader opportunity than ever existed in radio.

British producers ... do not consider what the public requires. They do not produce good pictures. They have never produced good pictures. They simply produce pictures and shove them out at the world. ...
You have no personalities to put on the screen. The stage actors and actresses are no good on the screen. Your effects are no good, and you do not spend nearly so much money.

 quoted in Bioscope, 8 January 1925
cf Marcus Loew

ARTHUR M SCHLESINGER Jr

1917- 2007; American historian

Television has spread the habit of instant reaction and has stimulated the hope of instant results.

 quoted in Newsweek, 6 July 1970

VOLKER SCHLΦNDORFF

1939- ; German film director, manager of Babelsberg Studios

The new technologies are not going to alter supply in the marketplace, and diversity will be reserved for a minority. The Brussels programmes arent going to be able to save the chairmen of companies [who] dont desire it.

 European Audiovisual Conference, July 1994

MURRAY SCHUMACH

1913-2004; New York Times columnist

Television is the bland leading the bland.

 The Face on the Cutting Room Floor: The story of movie and television censorship, 1964, 1974. Paraphrase of Matthew 15:14: 'And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.'

1 Television? The word is half Latin and half Greek. No good can come of it.

 attrib

2 The newspaper is of necessity something of a monopoly, and its first duty is to shun the temptations of monopoly. Its primary office is the gathering of news. At the peril of its soul it must see that the supply is not tainted. Neither in what it gives, nor in what it does not give, nor in the mode of presentation, must the unclouded face of truth suffer wrong. Comment is free but facts are sacred.

 Manchester Guardian, 6 May 1921

RAYMOND SCOTT

1908-1994; US composer, musician, electronic music pioneer

Perhaps within the next hundred years, science will perfect a process of thought transference from composer to listener. The composer will sit alone on the concert stage and merely THINK his idealized conception of his music. Instead of recordings of actual music sound, recordings will carry the brainwaves of the composer directly to the mind of the listener.

 1949

WILLIAM SEABURY

William Marston Seabury
1878-1949; American film lawyer, General Counsel to the Motion Picture Board of Trade and the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry

It is unthinkable that America shall continue to entrust the amusement of her children to alien and uneducated men as it would be to turn over her schools, her pulpits or her press to such men.

 'The Kind of Men who Control the Motion Picture Industry', 1926; quoted in Garth S Jowett, Ian C Jarvie and Kathryn H Fuller (eds): Children and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund Controversy, 1996

GILBERT SELDES

Gilbert Vivian Seldes1893-1970; Director of CBS Television 1939-1945, later critic

1 We seem to be watching, for the hundredth time, the traditional development of an American art-enterprise: an incredible ingenuity in the mechanism, great skill in the production techniquesand stale, unrewarding, contrived, and imitative banality for the total result.

 of television, 1949

2 The product must have no special quality; it must be average, because it is offered to a large, fairly homogeneous group of buyers, who would no more accept an unusual picture under the familiar trademarks than they would accept an occasional bar of green soap in an Ivory wrapper.

1 It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by 12 dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.

 source unknown

2 Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.

 Vogue, 1 April 1957

CHARLES H SEWALL

The child born today in New York City, when in middle age, shall visit China, may see reproduced upon a screen, with all its movement and color, light and shade, a procession at that moment passing along his own Broadway. A telephone line will bring to his ear music and the tramp of marching men. While the American pageant passes in full glare of the morning sun, its transmitted ray will scintillate upon the screen amid the darkness of an Asian night. Sight and sound will have unlimited reach through terrestrial space.

 Harpers Weekly, 29 December 1900

NICOLAS SEYDOUX

1939- ; Chief Executive, Gaumont

There is the lack of a European will to defend its cinema which is the cause of its decline. The Europeans have refused to produce movies for the cinema. We have to make movies with the will to talk to the public.

 European Audiovisual Conference, July 1994

LEON SHAMROY

1901-1974; American cinematographer

Not too far off is the 'electronic camera'. A compact, lightweight box no larger than a Kodak Brownie, it will contain a highly sensitive pickup tube, 100 times faster than present-day film stocks. A single lens system will adjust to any focal length by the operator merely turning a knob, and will replace the cumbersome interchangeable lenses of today. The camera will be linked to the film recorder by coaxial cable or radio. The actual recording of the scene on film will take place at a remote station, under ideal conditions. Instead of waiting for a dayor days, in the case of shooting with colorelectronic monitor screens connected to the system will make it possible to view the scene as it is being recorded. Control of contrast and color will be possible before development.
It is not difficult to predict the effect of such advancements on the production of motion pictures. Economically it will mean savings in time and money. Since the photographic results will be known immediately, it will be unnecessary to tie up actors and stages for long periods of time. The size and sensitivity of this new camera will make photography possible under ordinary lighting conditions. Shooting pictures on distant locations will be simplified. Generators, lighting units and other heavy equipment will be eliminated, thus doing away with costly transportation.

The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.

 A Mathematical Theory of Communications, 1948. The seminal work on the subject

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

1859-1950; British playwright and music critic

1 The cinema is going to form the mind of England. The national conscience, the national ideals and tests of conduct, will be those of the film.

 'The Cinema as a Moral Leveler', New Statesman, 27 June 1914

2 You frequent picture palaces. ... Talk like a man, not a movy [sic].

 Heartbreak House Act 1, 1919

3 The trouble, Mr Goldwyn, is that you are only interested in art and I am only interested in money.

 to Samuel Goldwyn during negotiations for the sale of film rights in one of his plays

Sir ISAAC SHOENBERG

1880-1963; Russian-born naturalised British electronics engineer; head of the UK team at EMI that developed all-electronic television

Well, gentlemen, you have now invented the biggest time-waster of all time. Use it well.

 1934, following his team's demonstration of the Emitron electronic television camera tube

MILTON SHULMAN

1913-2004; Canadian-born British theatre and television critic

Politicians have insisted that TV be primarily an entertainment medium. The methods by which it is financed makes it impossible for it to be anything else.
Politicians, catering to the entertainment medium they have created, insist on being popular bit-part actors in this electronic spectacular.
They turn up on chat shows, giggle away with comics and starlets, run election campaigns that belittle the issues, produce Party political programmes modelled on quiz shows and detergent commercials.

 Evening Standard, 14 July 1971

JEAN SIBELIUS

1865-1957; Finnish composer

Pay no attention to what the critics say; no statue has ever been put up to a critic.

 source unknown

ROBERT SILVEY

R J E Silvey
?-1981; Head of BBC Audience Research 1936-1960

Audience measurement, properly used, can be a good servant; but it is a bad master. ... The fate of the Battleship Potemkin shows what happens when the ratings take over.

 The measurement of audiences, BBC Lunch-time Lecture Fourth Series no 4, 12 January 1966
See also Sir Stephen Tallents 3

Now what is the cogent necessity which is urged in favour of this [BBC] monopoly to be perpetuated as is proposed? It has been put in various ways but I think it always comes down to this: that we must not lower the standard of broadcasting; that we must not give the people what they want because they might want something that is not good for them. How utterly that should be rejected in a democratic country!

We looked at all the videos in their houses and checked their list of rentals from the shop. We did not find Childs Play 3, nor did we find anything in the list that could have encouraged them to do what they did. If you are going to link this murder to a film, you might as well link it to The Railway Children.

 The Guardian, 13 April 1994, commenting on the investigation of two 11-year-old boys convicted of murdering two-year-old James Bulger and leaving the body on a railway line

MONICA SIMS

Head of Childrens Programmes, BBC Television 1967-78

American cartoons, whether comedy like Deputy Dawg and Tom and Jerry or adventures like Journey to the Centre of the Earth or Marine Boy, always attract a very high proportion of satisfied child viewers, even though their parents may sometimes object to the use of American material or to the fact that the programmes are not informative or uplifting. My own view is that such comedy cartoons are first-class entertainment and are so expensive to make that we could never afford to make our own.

 Report to BBCs General Advisory Council, 1969

ANN SKINNER

British film producer

We felt the market was saturated with what my aunt calls dishwashers fighting washing machines. There wasnt a real person in sight and a lot of grown-up people had been driven out of the cinema as a result.

 May 1982

SIDNEY SKOLSKY

1905-1983; Hollywood gossip columnist

She [Lana Turner] was 'discovered' for movies in the drugstore, sitting at the soda fountain. Thousands of girls have since sat at drugstore fountains drinking sodas and waiting to be discovered. They only got fat from the sodas.

 New York Post, 12 January 1958

CHRIS SMITH

1951- Labour MP; Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport 1997-2001

The distinctions between the higher and popular arts are meaningless.

 1997; defending his statement that Bob Dylan is as valid a poet as John Keats
See also Rupert Murdoch

ELLIS SMITH

1896-1969; Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent

I am concerned with the effect upon the lives of our young people of too many films coming from Hollywood especially on Saturday afternoons when you can see thousands of young children, from working-class areas in particular, going to matinees and seeing films which they ought not to see. They ought to be seeing films of an educational character, or films bringing the best out of life rather than films which cater for the emotions.

 House of Commons, 20 December 1944

FRED SMITH

David Frederick Smith1888-1977; US radio scriptwriter

On a thousand fronts the events of the world move swiftly forward. Tonight the editors of Time, the weekly newsmagazine, attempt a new kind of reporting of the news, the re-enacting as clearly and dramatically as the medium of radio will permit some themes from the news of the week. From the March of Time. ... Time marches on.

 Introduction and final phrase of The March of Time, CBS Radio Network, 10:30pm EST, 6 March-5 June 1931 (relayed by the BBC in Britain)

Technical progress, which for centuries grew by devouring nature, proceeds at the expense of culture and man himself. Having always in the past been a participant, or even a maker, of history, man is today furiously swept along by technical progress, whose stormy successes are contributing to a numbing of the person.
Our capacity for concentration and deep inner contemplation, which we are already forfeiting, is being overwhelmed by a tidal wave of inordinate superficial information. This avalanche leaves less and less room for spirituality, so that may have lost it altogether; less and less room for love not confined to sexual attraction alone. More and more, man is transformed from a cultural-historical type to a
technogenic type. This deep-seated psychological shift threatens humanity with the loss of its very self.

Then one day we saw hanging on the walls great posters as long as serpents. At every street corner a man, his face covered with a red handkerchief, levelled a revolver at the peaceful passerby. We imagined that we heard galloping hooves, the roar of motors, explosions and cries of death. We rushed into the cinema and realised immediately that everything had changed. On the screen appeared the smile of Pearl White—that almost ferocious smile which announced the revolution, the beginning of a new world.

2 Sweeping across the country with the speed of a transient fashion in slang or Panama hats, political war cries or popular novels, comes now the mechanical device to sing for us a song or play for us a piano, in substitute for human skill, intelligence, and soul. Only by harking back to the day of the roller skate or the bicycle craze, when sports of admitted utility ran to extravagance and virtual madness, can we find a parallel to the way in which these ingenious instruments have invaded the land. ...
[I foresee] a marked deterioration in music and musical taste, an interruption in the musical development of the country, and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtueor rather by viceof the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines. ...
[While] the ingenuity of a phonographs mechanism may incite the inventive genius to its improvement, I could not imagine that a performance by it would ever inspire embryotic [sic] Mendelssohns, Beethovens, Mozarts, and Wagners to the acquirement of technical skill, or to the grasp of human possibilities in the art. ... Under such conditions the tide of amateurism cannot but recede, until there will be left only the mechanical device and the professional executant. Singing will no longer be a fine accomplishment; vocal exercises will be out of vogue! Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?

 The Menace of Mechanical Music, Appletons Magazine, 1906?

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

1949- ; American singer/songwriter

1 We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school.

 'No Surrender', 1984

2 57 channels and nothing on.

 song title, 1991

FRANK STANTON

1908-2006; President of CBS 1946-1971

1 Color television wholly eliminates the interval in which your mind must take a black and white image into the darkroom of your brain and print it, on the intellect, as the true colored picture which the eye actually sees in nature. Thus, color television adds speed and claritygreater impact and more information to each image and every sequence.

 1951; the CBS colour television system had recently been adopted by the Federal Communications Commission, although subsequently dropped

2 [Pay TV] would hijack the American public into paying for the privilege of looking at its own television sets. ... This is a booby trap, a scheme to render the television owner blind, and then rent him a seeing eye dog at so much per mileto restore to him, only very partially, what he had previously enjoyed as a natural right. ... Television could no longer remain half free and half fee.

3 To curtail or destroy the [television] networks unique quality of instantaneous national interconnection would be a colossal backward step. It would make the United States much more like Europe than America. In fact, it would be a step in the direction of the Balkanization, the fragmentation, of the United States.

 evidence to a US Congressional committee, 1956

4 I believe there has been some progressat least as far as the Congress is concerned, where any prospects of legislative action in favor of pay television has been indefinitely postponed.

 speech to CBS affiliate stations, 1957

5 Because a federally licensed medium is involved, no more serious episode has occurred in government-press relationships since the dark days in the fumbling infancy of this Republic when the ill-fated Alien and Sedition Acts forbade criticism of the government and its policies on pain of exile or imprisonment.

 speech to International Radio and Television Society, 25 November 1969, reacting to Spiro T Agnew

Something must soon be done to bring system into the problem of releasing films and their theme songs, or the gramophone people responsible for choosing the theme songs to record and the dates on which to issue the records will just go mad. The film folk make their programmes months ahead, arranging the London pre-release date, the London general release date, and the provincial release date. The publisher of the theme songs who looks to gramophone record royalties for his big profits rather than to sales of sheet music has to make plans for a big publicity campaign at the psychological momentif he can find it; and the recording people have to decide whether to issue the record red hot when the film is first seen and criticised or to wait till the general release of the film makes the largest number of the public go round to the local dealer for a record: and perhaps has to decide whether a tune is a best-seller on its own merits quite apart from the film in which it is introduced.

 'Film Notes' in The Gramophone, May 1930

G W STONIER

George Walter Stonier1903-1985; English critic, novelist and radio playwright, literary editor of The New Statesman, contributor to Sight and Sound

Cinema audiences are conditioned to like what they get, and even though the more critical film fan may despise some of the twice weekly syrup ladled out to him, he has caught the habit. ...
The average mental age of audiences has been worked out by one producer at 13½ years and he shapes his films accordingly.

1 That in the opinion of the House a flourishing British kinema industry is of increasing importance, and that all practicable steps be taken to assist its foundation on a firm basis.

 motion proposed, and carried, in House of Lords, April 1935

2 When the last Great War ended the British film producing industry had practically ceased and for seventeen years has had an uphill struggle to try to get back to the position held previously. The first reason that induced me to raise the matter is that we do not want that state of affairs to occur again. I believe that is also the Government view. ... In the last Great War all the men were taken from the industry but the industry was not so important, people had not recognised its importance for entertainment and in moulding the public opinion and, to speak bluntly, as a means of propaganda, disguised or open. ...
If his department [Films Division of Brendan Brackens Ministry of Information] is going to make propaganda films he should be careful. The obvious propaganda film never creates the effect intended. All films of course have some propaganda value. ... Even the Hollywood rule that good shall always triumph over evil has a propaganda value.

 House of Lords debate on the film industry, 3 December 1939cf W Glenvil Hall

IGOR STRAVINSKY

1882-1971; Russian-born composer

Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebodys piano playing in my living room has to the book I am reading.

 Music Digest September 1946

Sir HOWARD STRINGER

1942- ; British-born president of Sony Corporation of America 1997-

Doesn't anybody here think this sounds like a vision of hell? While we are all competing or dying, when will there be time for sex or music or books? Stop the world, I want to get off.

 Response to descriptions by Bill Gates and others of a world 'liberated' by electronic technology at the World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, January 2001

Sir ARTHUR SULLIVAN

1842-1900; British composer

I can only say that I am astonished and somewhat terrified at the results of this evening's experimentastonished at the wonderful power you have developed, and terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record forever. But all the same, I think it is the most wonderful thing that I have ever experienced, and I congratulate you with all my heart on this wonderful discovery.

 After-dinner speech at 'Little Menlo', London, addressing an absent Edison after hearing a demonstration of the phonograph, 5 October 1888.Recorded by Edison's foreign sales agent Colonel George Gouraud. Click on phonograph to hear.

W SUTHERLAND

American sociologist

Since the average citizen is unable to invent new uses for his leisure, a professional ιlite shares a heavy responsibility for discovering criteria for ways of employing leisure and creating enthusiasm for common ends within the moral aims of the community.

 A philosophy of leisure in Annals of the American Academy, September 1957

Politicians are not interested in programmes. They don't really watch the programmes, as a matter of fact; they are much more concerned about politics and how much exposure they get on the BBC and, by definition, they never get enough.

Animation is built on plagiarism. If it weren't for someone plagiarizing The Honeymooners, we wouldn't have The Flintstones. If someone hadn't ripped off Sergeant Bilko, there'd be no Top Cat. Huckleberry Hound, Chief Wiggum, Yogi Bear? Andy Griffith, Edward G Robinson, Art Carney.

 The Simpsons, episode 3F16, 'The Day the Violence Died', first transmitted March 1996
See also Randy Newman 2

1 Distant electric vision can probably be solved by the employment of two beams of kathode rays (one at the transmitting and one at the receiving station) synchronously deflected by the varying fields of two electromagnets placed at right angles to one another and energised by two alternating electric currents of widely different frequencies, so that the moving extremities of the two beams are caused to sweep synchronously over the whole of the required surfaces within the one-tenth of a second necessary to take advantage of visual persistence. Indeed, so far as the receiving apparatus is concerned, the moving kathode beam has only to be arranged to impinge on a suitably sensitive fluorescent screen, and given suitable variations in its intensity, to obtain the desired result.

 Letter to Nature, 18 June 1908; this was the first full
description of an all-electronic television system

2 Surely it would be better policy if those who can afford the time and money would abandon mechanical devices and expend their labours in what appears likely to prove the ultimately more promising method in which the only moving parts are imponderable electrons.